Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Learn about Database Deployment in DC

    SQL in the City is coming to the DC area in a few weeks with a seminar on the Stairway to Database Deployment. Both Grant Fritchey and I are traveling to the Washington DC area to deliver a half day, free seminar event on Friday, December 6, 2013. We are likely going to be in the Chevy Chase, MD side of DC that afternoon, but I don’t have a location right now.

    If you are in the area, and want to see our vision of how to streamline your database development and deployment and make it run smoother, register today. It’s free, it’s a half day, and afterwards Grant and I will be chatting with you at a happy hour to talk shop, deployment, anything you want.

    The seminar is three sessions. I have been presenting the first 2, and Grant the third. The sessions build on each other and are the following:

    • Team-based Development with Version Control
    • Automated Database Build and Test
    • Best Practices for Database Deployment

    I’ll also be at SQL Saturday #233 – Washington, DC on Saturday, December 7, 2013. I think I have one session, and I may leave early as I have family in the area, but I’ll be there all morning and happy to chat with you, shake hands, or even just say hi.

    If you can attend, please register for SQL in the City or SQL Saturday #233. Both events are free, but we’d like to know who’s coming so we can plan.

  • More Vacation

    As I try to recharge and relax, I’m taking today and tomorrow off. Just a quick note that I’m trying to live up to my advice and get away from work when I can.

  • Time for Learning

    Working in technology means that we are constantly challenged to learn new skills and improve our existing ability to get work done. When I started as a DBA, I could work within SQL Server, writing T-SQL, making backups, and managing security. As the product has evolved, I’ve needed to learn more about Active Directory to troubleshoot security, I’ve been called upon to cluster machines and implement replication. There are all sorts of areas in which I’ve found it important to develop some expertise.

    However time is short. With family, with work, with commitments in the rest of my life, how do I find time to work on improving my career skills? Most of the time has been spent at work, slipping in learning time during a project, but I’ve also had to spend some time at night, practicing skills or reading about the intricacies of some feature.

    Andy Warren has estimated that it really takes around 100 hours to develop some level of competence with a new skill. That’s 100 hours in a year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but dedicating two hours a week to your career can be challenging. It’s much less than the 10,000 estimate for expertise, which is good since most of us can’t spare that much time to become an expert.

    However is 100 hours too many? There was a TED talk that noted you could learn a new skill, at an acceptable level in 20 hours. I’m skeptical that this is true, and I’d certainly point out that there is prep time to analyze a skill, learn something about it, and then build the plan to learn. Those items alone could take much more than 20 hours.

    I’m not sure what a good level is, but I’m thinking to try this in my life in some area and see what 20 hours gets me. I’m also on a Powershell Challenge, which will probably end up being close to 30 hours, but I’ll see how comfortable I am with the skill after that time. However, do you think you could learn something like Powershell in 20 hours?

    Steve Jones

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  • Powershell in a Month – Day 2, Help

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about Powerhsell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Today was Chapter 3, Using the Help System. Another not-so-exciting topic, but one that does matter. There are a ton of commands to learn and use in PoSh and being able to get help on them is important if you are to develop code with any level of speed. Note I said code. This is scripting, it’s interactive, but it’s code. Whether you run it once or save it and schedule executions every minute, it’s code.

    The first point in the chapter is to RTFM, or “read the friendly manual”. The authors emphasize that using Google instead of help means you’re copying code, not learning about the code, and potentially stunting your development or even wrecking your production system with commands you don’t understand. As much as I love Google, I can understand the point here.

    One of the first things the chapter does is ask you to update help. However that didn’t work for me:

    Posh_006

    The book doesn’t talk about the CLI v the ISE, which is the problem. I found a post on MSDN that noted this works from Powershell, but not the Powershell ISE.  Once I went to the CLI, it worked.

    Posh_005

    I used to do UNIX work, and was forever typing “Man xxx” to learn about xxx. MAN is a wrapper here, as is “help” for the get-help command. I played around with some get-help stuff, using wildcards and tab completion. Both of which are handy. I can definitely see that learning to use help and tab is important.

    The rest of the chapter brings out various ways in which you can use help, including getting more details, getting examples, and going to the online pages, which are more up to date than your local copy might be. All good tricks to getting going with PoSh. Lots of example commands showing how to get help, and I ran most of these.

    The chapter was boring, but at the end when I got to the lab, I was surprised how little I know. As I tried to go through the lab questions, I wasn’t sure what was working and what wasn’t. I didn’t know if I was actually running the right commands, since things like “help *array*” worked. There are answers you can download from the morelunches.com site, and once I did that, I was able to check my results, and get help on a few items I wasn’t sure about. 

    I was surprised that I learned a few things, and I can definitely see that working with help is both important, and cumbersome. For example, the scrolling isn’t smooth in the ISE and the MORE piping from the HELP wrapper doesn’t work. Definitely something to practice on as I move through the book.